Tuesday, August 07, 2018

Ballad of a shirtless man

From what I've been able to gather about the guy and his works, life is too short to spend much time listening to Alex Jones, so I haven't bothered with him. Based on what I see of him from social media, he seems to be an angry guy who likes (a) conspiracy theories, and (b) to be photographed without his shirt on, even though he appears to be pretty tubby. I will add that nearly every time I see something about him, it's because a lefty has called it to my attention.

All but one of the major content platforms have banned the American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, as the companies raced to act in the wake of Apple’s decision to remove five podcasts by Jones and his Infowars website.

Facebook unpublished four pages run by Jones for “repeated violations of community standards”, the company said on Monday. YouTube terminated Jones’s account over him repeatedly appearing in videos despite being subject to a 90-day ban from the website, and Spotify removed the entirety of one of Jones’s podcasts for “hate content”.

Facebook’s removal of the pages – the Alex Jones Channel Page, the Alex Jones Page, the Infowars Page and the Infowars Nightly News Page – comes after the social network imposed a 30-day ban on Jones personally “for his role in posting violating content to these pages”.

Is there evidence that Jones has become a more effective propagandist? Has his following increased? If his stuff was okay before, why isn't it now?

This is dumb. If the argument is this guy is too dangerous to have his stuff out there for public consumption, banning him is the best way possible to ensure he'll get even a larger audience. We've known this since the Garden of Eden, which was also well known for shirtless dudes -- forbidden fruit is always going to have an audience. What does Alex Jones know that "they" don't want you to know? This is Conspiracy Theory 101.
It's not a First Amendment issue, because the government isn't stopping Jones from speaking. If you want that sort of thing, you need to check with Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. Still, I'm not crazy about the trendline. As long as I'm free to continue ignoring Alex Jones, I'm free. Once we are told his nonsense cannot be considered in any context, we have a much larger problem than whatever he's talking about. Based on what I know, Alex Jones is a bad dude. It's always a bad idea to make a bad dude a martyr.

3 comments:

These large tech companies, with their market shares and their willingness to engage in controlling speech along partisan lines... Are they trying to provoke government action to regulate them? I'd rather not. But if they are going to behave that way, then I think busting them up needs to get investigated.